Israel’s Descent

Adam Shatz, 20 June 2024

The State of Israel v. the Jews 
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
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Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme 
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January 2024, 978 2 02 154166 3
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Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78 
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 26785 3
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Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life 
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August 2024, 978 0 593 18718 0
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The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance 
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
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Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm 
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, April 2024, 978 1 68219 619 9
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... based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... a participant recorded, they sat with ‘red ears’ as a leading authority of the WGE, Hans Peter Ipsen, instructed them on the supremacy of European law over the national law of any member state. Ipsen’s opinion would prevail: five days later Lecourt issued the ECJ’s ruling on Costa v. Enel to the same effect. The cornerstone of European justice ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

... who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them? I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe sometime in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... 953168 5Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society by Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher.Oxford, 320 pp., £32.95, March 2009, 978 0 19 856788 2The Memoirs of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... the largest 20 US contractors had been reduced to four: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Their sales now account for $150 billion, and they control a vast proportion of state contracts. Net profit in the sector, as a share of the total net profit of the Fortune 500, doubled (to 10 per cent) between 1965 and 1985. This ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... Paymasters held to ransom. ‘That was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone absolutely perfectly.’ In boroughs affected by this 2012 game-show rabies – long-established businesses closed down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out – there were ...

Trains in Space

James Meek: The Great Train Robbery, 5 May 2016

The Railways: Nation, Network and People 
by Simon Bradley.
Profile, 645 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84668 209 4
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... Liverpool Street Station, transformed between 1985 and 1991 into one of those termini where, as Martin Amis sneered a few years later in The Information, the trains have become an awkward adjunct to the business of retail and catering. ‘The old Liverpool Street,’ Bradley counters, ‘was a dirty, baffling place’: The 1991 incarnation with its ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... and market reform is questionable.’ A robuster brand of optimism was expressed by the late Martin Malia. Author of The Soviet Tragedy – a passionate requisitory of Bolshevism from the liberal right, ideologically parallel to François Furet’s Past of an Illusion (the two were close friends), but intellectually everything it is not, a work of ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’

Simon Skinner, 25 June 2026

The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup 
by Jonathan Wilson.
Little Brown, 608 pp., £12.99, May, 978 0 349 14573 0
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... and Marco Tardelli’s primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia ...